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Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

cs.stanford.edu

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Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#51

Post by random9749832 »

quacked wrote: post #30
random9749832 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.

This isn't true. I put in a great deal of effort in college and struggled to learn. After college I changed the way I interacted with information, and found that I could learn and remember orders of magnitude better by using studying and practice techniques that mapped more closely with how I thought about information.

Learning is a loop of reading/listening > applying/questioning. The rest is gobbledygook.

And when I say learning, I mean understanding the material, not just remembering a bunch of information for an exam.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#52

Post by SoftTalker »

kevmo314 wrote: post #34

> All-nighters are not worth it. I disagree. I made some of my best friends through all nighters and continue to occasionally pull them because they reinvigorate meaning into my work as they did my coursework. If your only metric for success in school is your GPA, then yes all nighters aren’t worth it. But climbing a metric leaderboard isn’t the only measure of doing well in a course. It is curious because Andrej rec…

Occasional all-nighters can be fun. We even did them at work back in the dotcom days. I wouldn't do them now, because they don't really accomplish anything. But they can be fun.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#53

Post by sodality2 »

jackling wrote: post #22

Lots of good advice in this article. My favorite pieces that I agree with 100%: > Reading and understanding IS NOT the same as replicating the content. This happens to me all the time. It's really important to try and replicate everything that you learn. I would go even further and constantly reaffirm that you still know how to prove facts that you take for granted. > NEVER. EVER. EVER. Leave a test early. Every time…

> Trying to cram in as much knowledge as possible when your brain is fried isn't going to help you all that much.

I think the trade-off of being a little jittery and possibly scoring better on an exam is probably worth it. Unless you turn it into a habit, a few hours short on sleep a month isn't going to measurably harm you. Then again, it depends on how much you stand to gain from studying those extra few hours - and it's equally important to be realistic on that quantity.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#54

Post by [deleted] »

leobg wrote: post #46
brosco wrote: post #10

I have a tip for following lectures (or any technical talk, really) that I've been meaning to write about for a while. As you follow along with the speaker, try to predict what they will say next. These can be either local or global predictions. Guess what they will write next, or what will be on the next slide. With some practice (and exposure to the subject area) you can usually get it right. Also try to keep track…

Well said. And it makes sense, if you define intelligence as the ability to successfully predict the future. And how interesting that that is literally how LLMs are trained during pretraining. Like Ilya said: To predict the name revealed as the murderer at the end of a detective novel, you must have followed the plot, have world knowledge about physics, psychology, etc.. And that’s what you’re pointing at here. Testi…

[deleted]

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#55

Post by random9749832 »

xmprt wrote: post #40
random9749832 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every learning method you can think of has been thought of before and all variations have been implemented in classrooms throughout time. It is mostly pseudo-science. You either put in the effort to learn and struggle until you succeed or you don't. There is no secret sauce.

There are are a 100 different ways to struggle to learn. Some of them are better than others. I don't see how that's pseudoscience.

There are 100 different sources to learn from. And they certainly aren't as good as one another.

There being 100 different ways to learn though is questionable.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#56

Post by epolanski »

joshvm wrote: post #17

One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/g…

This posts sums up everything that's wrong with grading and modern colleges.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#57

Post by epolanski »

Cyph0n wrote: post #5

This is excellent advice. I personally rarely joined group study sessions, but thinking back, I should have joined more of them. To expand on one of the points listed here: do a first pass through questions before writing a single thing and mark which you feel are easy vs. hard (this evaluation may change once you start working on them!). Your prioritization should be: easier + higher points, easier + lower points, t…

I've always studied with peers after classes (I'm a chemistry master) and it was the best way to learn. Discuss different ideas and approaches and understandings was a force multiplier.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#59

Post by SoftTalker »

didip wrote: post #43

So many “hot takes” about studying but really it comes down to 1 thing: Are you disciplined enough to have an excellent time management. That’s basically it.

Paraphrasing a saying that is popular among coaches:

Everyone has the desire to win but very few have the will to prepare to win.

Doing well in school is overwhelmingly about simply having the will to do the work. To read, listen, take notes, study, practice, and review. There's no magic.

Re: Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)

#60

Post by m-ee »

storus wrote: post #32
joshvm wrote: post #17

One really important factor is the grading curve, if used. At my university, I think the goal was to give the average student 60%, or a mid 2.1) with some formula for test score adjustment to compensate for particularly tough papers. The idea is that your score ends up representing your ability with respect to the cohort and the specific tests that you were given. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/physics/current/teach/g…

That won't work at elite schools like Stanford where a hard class average is like 98% and 94% will give you B+ due to the opposite curve being applied.

I went to Stanford and that was absolutely not the case. I once got an A on a midterm with a 65%
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